San Francisco is home to 70 of the 500 most capitalized AI firms in the world.
Photo by Dee Liu: Getty Images
Among the 500 most capitalized AI firms in the world, 70 are located in San Francisco, California, topped by OpenAI, the firm whose co-founder Sam Altman is in the news this week after an in-depth profile by Ronan Farrow and Andrew Marantz in The New Yorker.
That total comes from sorting through data released by Pitchbook earlier this week that tracks the highest-valued AI companies in the world. Pitchbook has tracked 34,900 of them in all. But a look at where the AI 500 are located offers some indication not only of already vibrant clusters like the Bay Area, but even some non-California municipalities that may surprise you.
Let’s get to it. Here are the Top 25 cities by number of companies within those 500 firms:
| City | No. of Top 500 AI Firms |
|---|---|
| San Francisco, California | 70 |
| New York, New York | 44 |
| Beijing, China | 23 |
| Palo Alto, California | 21 |
| London, United Kingdom | 19 |
| Boston, Massachusetts | 16 |
| Mountain View, California | 11 |
| San Jose, California | 10 |
| Santa Clara, California | 10 |
| Shanghai, China | 10 |
| Redwood City, California | 9 |
| San Diego, California | 8 |
| Singapore | 8 |
| Chicago, Illinois | 7 |
| Paris, France | 7 |
| San Mateo, California | 6 |
| Shenzhen, China | 6 |
| South San Francisco, California | 6 |
| Atlanta, Georgia | 5 |
| Austin, Texas | 5 |
| Berlin, Germany | 5 |
| Hangzhou, China | 5 |
| Miami, Florida | 5 |
| Stockholm, Sweden | 5 |
| Cambridge, Massachusetts | 4 |
| Los Angeles, California | 4 |
The 10 California communities in those 25 account for 155 of the 500 top AI firms. The four Chinese cities account for 44 of them.
Overall, the United States is home to 340 of the 500 companies (68%). Here are the top countries after that:
| Country | No. of Top 500 AI Firms |
|---|---|
| China | 58 |
| United Kingdom | 24 |
| Germany | 14 |
| France | 9 |
| India | 7 |
| Israel | 7 |
| Canada | 6 |
| Japan | 5 |
The highest-valued AI firm in No. 3 country the United Kingdom is Nscale, the hyperscale AI infrastructure company, which established its first physical office just last September in London’s Mayfair neighborhood. Among its latest announced data center complexes are a site to be developed with Fortum in Harjavalta, Finland, and the acquisition of the Monarch Compute Campus, a site with up to 2,250 acres in Mason County, West Virginia, and the United States’ first state-certified AI microgrid with a power runway scalable to over eight gigawatts. (See Ron Starner’s account of that microgrid’s development, “Making a Microgrid Out of a Mountain,” published in the July 2025 issue of Site Selection.)
Nscale CEO Josh Payne said of the company’s office location choice, “London is a natural anchor for this vision. As one of the world’s most dynamic hubs for technology, finance and policy, it connects us to customers, partners and policymakers across the continent. It also gives us a base from which to deepen collaboration and accelerate the adoption of AI across industries and public life.”
Overall, California can claim 187 of the 500 (37%) — and eight of the top 10 by last known valuation, led by OpenAI, Anthropic and Stripe. See Site Selection’s September 2025 California Spotlight, “The State That Could Be a Country,” for our conversation with Mark Muro of Brookings Metro about where AI skills are most concentrated. Brookings also offered this map last summer derived from Lightcast data tracking AI-related job postings:
The two non-California exceptions in that top 10 by valuation are also non-U.S.: Beijing-based ByteDance (developer of TikTok) and Canva, headquartered in Surry Hills, Australia. A report by Yicai Global in February reported that ByteDance had spent the equivalent of $403 million to purchase land at auction for more office buildings to be constructed in the Haidian district in central Beijing.
Extend to the top 20 by valuation and only two more pop up, both in Beijing: business productivity software Moonshot AI and cryptocurrency mining hardware firm BitMain, whose list of established R&D center locations includes a number of places in the Pitchbook AI list, among them Shanghai, Singapore and Shenzhen.
TikTok parent ByteDance is said to be planning more buildings in the Haidian district in Beijing.
Getty Images
That top 20 list also allows in some other U.S. locations beyond California: New York City-based Ramp and VAST Data, and Epic Games, the developer of Fortnite and Unreal Engine, whose HQ resides in the Raleigh suburb of Cary, North Carolina.
That’s where Epic Games Founder and CEO Tim Sweeney on March 26 announced the company would need to lay off more than 1,000 people due in part to a downturn in engagement with Fortnite.
“Some of the challenges we’re facing are industry-wide challenges,” he wrote in an open letter. “Slower growth, weaker spending, and tougher cost economics; current consoles selling less than last generation’s; and games competing for time against other increasingly-engaging forms of entertainment.”
But he was quick to point out that AI was not a culprit: “Since it’s a thing now,” he wrote, “I should note that the layoffs aren’t related to AI. To the extent it improves productivity, we want to have as many awesome developers developing great content and tech as we can.” — Adam Bruns
